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（A lot of chinese symbolism is used despite bnha being a japanese show. Please just pretend it Japanese or something. I just needed to put this into a fic)
Snow is falling. A bird soars against the wind. The last leaf falls from the tree.
Flowers grow in the winter in his father’s yard. He lives here, but this is not his home. He does not belong here, despite being the so called “successful child”. His father’s friends tell him he’s a flower in winter. His mother once had him in her lap, sitting on the bench in the yard, he blowing snowflakes off his nose, his mother laughing softly, her eyes glistening. She told him the pale pink flowers were called plum blossoms, or as the Japanese called them, ‘Japanese Apricots’. Then she’d pull him closer and kiss him on the cheek.
A year later, he’d find a small book in household library on the language of flowers, and he thought he knew why it made his mother smile fondly at him. They stood for perseverance in his mother’s culture, the virtuous gentleman of flowers, unwavering in the cold, providing hope to the world that winter would pass and spring would come along with it.
(Then his mother poured boiling water on him, and suddenly he realised that he had been his mother’s hope, that her tears were petals of breaking resolve, and that he wasn’t like a plum blossom at all.)
He doesn’t see his mother again. Endeavor doesn’t allow it, and there is nothing he can do, or so he tells himself. He doesn’t want to face his mother, doesn’t want to bear the burden of her hope. He starts to distance himself, stops talking as much as he used to, stops showing emotions on his face. The fire he yields responds to his emotions much more than the ice does, which is partially why he stops using it after the accident.
The aunts and uncles still compare him to a flower in the snow, and it still makes his father so very happy. He thinks that they may be right afterall, for not many flowers grow in the winter, and even if they do they grow alone and void of colour.
***
When he enters UA, he doesn’t go in expecting to make friends. He wants to maintain good grades, perform well in the Sports Festivals, and graduate as soon as he can and work as far away from his father as possible. He politely keeps his distance for the first few months, but one can only use family matters as an excuse a certain amount of times before the people who want to care call bullshit and drag him out on excursions anyways.
And so he makes friends. Quite a few, actually. Yaoyorozu drags him out on coffee dates every week or so. Midoriya invites him to their table for lunch. Uraraka shares her care packages from home with him, shoving chocolate bars and homemade cakes into his arms. Kirishima drags him to the skating rinks after school (he says it's so Shouto can smoothen the ice for them, but it doesn’t take a genius to tell that the red-haired boy just wants to include him in their class activities). He’s opened up, for sure, and he’s positive that he’s never laughed this much in any year of his life. But the darkness doesn’t just fade, it lingers on and occasionally consumes him whole. When it does, it feels like he’s drowning, like he’s been sucked into a void and the only way out is a fading speck of light million miles away.
Then one day, he realises that the speck of light is a boy. A boy with blond hair and ruby eyes and a temper of an aggravated cat. When he first enters the school, he thinks nothing of the boy, he’s only another obstacle in his way, another hurdle to pass before he can finally break free of his father. But there this boy stands, proud and without a damn care in the world, and he’s screaming at Shouto, telling him to fight him with everything he’s got. Midoriya had brought the fire out in him, and Bakugou had told Shouto to burn him. His opponent doesn’t give a damn shit whether it's his power or his father, and suddenly he understands what desperation feels like.
He wants the hope he so cruelly ripped from his mother’s for himself.
***
He burns out. It was a given, after all he hadn’t used the fire for so long the flames have forgotten the one who is to yield them. Mismatched eyes meet smoke and sparks and ice and fire and then he flies across the arena.
That night he lies awake, his arms covered in bandages, and he dreams of explosions.
***
“Todoroki, come join movie night!” They had moved into the dorms two days ago, and already his classmates had started class-bonding activities. Before he can answer, he is dragged across corridor after corridor, nearly tripping over as Uraraka flings him along using her quirk. “I… have homework,” he feebly supplies, but the tiny brunette furrowed her brows and crossed her arms, and Shouto decided that maybe letting her drag him from his studies for an hour or two wouldn’t cause too much harm.
The living room is packed when he gets there (or more accurately, when Uraraka tosses him onto the nearest beanbag to the television). He lands half sprawled between Kaminari and Kirishima, who both shriek like little children as they tumble to the floor. Todoroki nearly suffers the same fate, but Jirou saves him before he impales himself on Kirishima’s arm (that would make for a great tombstone: Todoroki Shouto, killed by a guy’s shard, what a heroic and heterosexual death).
Even though he is saved from a grisly fate, he still ends up with a bruised cheek (seriously?) and everyone laughs at him, except for Bakugou who stares at him from the armchair farthest to the television. It’s obvious that he doesn’t exactly aant to be there, but came anyways. Shouto wondered how they got him to come willingly.
An idea flashes across his brain, a ridiculous one, but someone in that moment Shouto’s self control all but disappeared, and he finds himself walking towards Bakugou and plopping himself right into the other boy’s lap. In hindsight, he probably shouldn’t have gone to sit with a guy who had a tendency to blast people in the face when they angered him, but for some unknown reason, the generally fiery-tempered boy didn’t give much protest as Shouto threw his legs over the other side of the couch and tilted his body such that he was lying on Bakugou’s shoulder.
Then someone started the movie, and the title screen started to roll. Then the mysterious reason as to why a certain habitually anti-social boy was currently putting up with team-bonding, which he tended to refer to as “fucking useless activities that no self-respecting human would partake in”.
The movie was Transformers.
When the movie started, he was still sitting relatively upright on the couch, his back to Bakugou, and maybe half of his ass squished again the other boy’s thigh, but even before the explosions started, he found himself half sprawled across the couch, and an elbow was digging into his back.
He wiggles a bit and turns towards Bakugou, and to his surprise the boy almost looks… bashful. Shouto never imagined the day one would use such a word to describe someone who was usually confident and shameless to a slightly worrying level.
What he understands, however, is the clearly uncomfortable look the other boy has on his face, and he’s about to apologise and maybe leave the room asap when Bakugou’s knee jerks and he nearly rolls off the armchair and onto the floor. He grabs at the nearest thing: the elbow that had caused him to move in the first place, when he realises that it is something else entirely.
He lets out a high-pitched yelp (his reputation has been utterly ruined damn Uraraka for pulling him out of him room and away from embarrassing himself without an audience) and tumbles to the ground just as something explodes on the tv and successfully draws everyone’s attention away.
“What the fucking hell was that?” Bakugou is still flushed, but now Shouto is more convinced that it's from anger than anything else. Shouto’s mind-filter lifts up once again, and he scrambles to his feet before looking Bakugou dead in the eye.
“I grabbed your dick.” He says, and the moment the words come out, he regrets ever meeting Bakugou Katsuki. “It was digging into my back.” He internally facepalms, wishing that he’d never even come to this school. “It’s fucking huge.” Okay there has to be something wrong with him because despite wanting to take back every sentence he’s just said, he ends up blurting out even worse phases instead.
But before he manages to run for his life, Bakugou grabs him by his collar and tows him away from the living room, Shouto fearing for his life everytime he hears the familiar sound of something being blown up. (For some reason at that moment he forgot that he was a hero and that he could totally freeze Bakugou in his steps, but he forgot.)
One minute he’s being thrust into some random person’s room, the other he’s being pushed onto the ground, and he lets out a muffled moan as his head collides with the floor. “What the hell…” he doesn’t finish the sentence.
There are foreign lips on his own, chapped and slightly sweet and Bakugou shoves his tongue into his defenseless mouth. The darkness in his swirls beneath the surface as Shouto throws his arms around the other boy’s neck, pulling himself deeper into the kiss.
When they finally let go to gasp for air, he realises that his face is burning, but in a good way. Both of them are sitting on the floor, panting, trying their best to avoid looking at each other without acting too oddlywhich was quite hard considering the room was small and they were practically sitting in front of each other.
There’s a short silence before Shouto decides that it would be a great time to throw his sense of self preservation out of the window all together. “Why did you do that?” He tilts his head towards his left shoulder and gives Bakugou a slightly confused look.
“Don’t try that on me I know you know exactly why I did that. It’s your fucking fault, teasing me like that, practically falling into my arms. I shouldn’t have fell for it, fuck, don’t you dare telling anyone about this or I’ll snap your damn throat.” This was the Bakugou Shouto was used to- gruff and violent. It almost made the moment before seem like a fleeting daydream instead of a fantastic makeout session with the hottest boy in the grade on the floor of another classmate’s room.
“You’re saying it out loud you dumb fuck,” the blond haired boy snapped, and Shouto was suddenly overcome with the urge to reach out across the small distance that separated the two of them and ruffle spiky blond hair (a more accurate description would have been impaling his fingers on the thin strands).
A pair of toned arms grabs at his waist and pulls him in, he raises his other hand to defend himself, but instead his nose ends up colliding with the other boy’s lips.
“Shit, half n half, can you do anything properly?” Bakugou hisses, but Shouto only raises an eyebrow before gently planting a chaste kiss on still-damp lips.
It’s amusing to see Bakugou turn the color of a pomegranate, eyes wide and lips slightly opened in reflex anticipation. “You know what this means right?” Shouto smiles oh so sweetly, and as their lips meet again, the darkness in his heart explodes into a flurry of pink petals and suddenly it both feels as if someone had just turned up the brightness filter on the world, and also as if nothing had happened.
Shouto bites back a moan as Bakugou sucks his lower lip, and raggedly pulls in for another kiss. “WHAT THE FUCK?” The two boys let go of each other like dropping hot coal, but the damage is already done. Aoyama’s scream had summoned the entirety of the class into the doorway of his room, their two strongest classmate's half sprawled on the floor, shirts rumpled with swollen lips and mussed hair.
They hear Ochako’s distinctive giggle as Iida mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like “fraternizing in the dorms is strictly prohibited”. Before Shouto manages to react, Bakugou has already stood up, scooped his into his arms and started making his way towards the door. Their classmates part like the red sea, Bakugou walking in their midst like a proud general and, to Shouto’s uttermost embarrassment, with him as the damsel in distress, as his bandages had started to unravel. It make his heart skip a beat that Bakugou, who always seemed rough and uncaring, had managed to notice such a small thing. It made him want to smile uncontrollably.
Shouto fidgets awkwardly as they stand before the lift, waiting as the other classmates "hide" around the corner and watch them and whisper among themselves. “I should probably…” “Don’t you dare.” Bakugou hisses before his fierce expression melts into fondness. Just as they enter the lift, Shouto tilts his head up.
“My room or yours?”
“Shut up shithead.”